Critique of Mar 2014 Awake on Creation by Alan Feuerbacher

by jwfacts 43 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  prologos

  just leafed through the March Awake and

  on page 7 wt writers & artists have the simple ASTRONOMY facts wrong:

  "FOURTH DAY--Sun and Moon DISCERNABLE from the EARTH surface"??? not in their picture!!

  From our planet, The Sun and Moon appear to be of ` the SAME size! not as shown, in their illustation, with a bigger Sun. --That might be true IF viewed from Venus.-- if it had our moon.

  We would not have such spectacular Solar Eclipses if the WT version held true.

  'My Book of Bible Stories' done wrongly.
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  hamsterbait

  Alan F has a professional background in science. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and worked in the field of microelectronics, designing microcircuitry and processors.

  scientific training hones the mind and critical skills, as can be seen in many of his articles, some of which can be found on the Talkorigins website.
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  watson

  Second, a study of the fulfillment of Bible prophecy and of our location in the stream of time strongly indicate that each of the creative days (Genesis, chapter 1) is 7,000 years long. It is understood that Christ’s reign of a thousand years will bring to a close God’s 7,000-year ‘rest day,’ the last ‘day’ of the creative week. (Revelation 20:6; Genesis 2:2, 3) Based on this reasoning, the entire creative week would be 49,000 years long.

  I can see the heads bobbing in unison.
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  Apognophos

  Yes, that 7,000 year assertion is amazing for how groundless it is -- well, was, since the Society dodges it now.

  This was a well-written critique. Something additional that I've just learned recently is that Genesis 1:1 is not even describing the creation of the universe. Alan F. hints at this in his article but may have chosen not to go into the complexities of it.

  The term "In the beginning" is referring to the start of creation, but the thing being created is an orderly earth. The account does not describe the creation of matter. Ancient man did not comprehend the concept that matter could be, or needed to be, created. Rather, the earth always existed as a big chaotic wet mess, and God was the one who put it in order.

  The Society is approaching the account with the viewpoint of a modern reader, who's been taught since childhood that the universe didn't always exist and that our planet is a ball hanging in space. The perspective of ancient man, on the other hand, explains why God creates what would seem to us to be a tremendous of stuff all at once in verse 1. In fact, nothing is created in verse 1 -- it's a prologue to the actual creation account -- and then in verse 2 God begins putting the world in order.

  When God does create the "heavens", he does so by basically hammering out a hard vaulted ceiling above our heads (the raqia that Alan F. touches on). This is how the Bible describes the sky in many scriptures, though some describe the sky as something stretched out, like a tapestry or tent (Isaiah 40:22, etc.), and some describe it as something hard (Job 22:14, etc.).

  So the Bible God didn't create the universe with all its galactic clusters and their billions of suns and planets -- not "in the beginning", or "in the first [24-hour] day", or "in the first [unspecified-length] day", because the universe isn't part of Genesis chapter 1 -- only the earth, with a ceiling that has pinpoints of light and two torches that move across the sky, one yellow and one gray. It's a far more modest, almost intimate affair compared to our current cosmological viewpoint.

  Source: http://contradictionsinthebible.com/genesis-1-not-a-creatio-ex-nihilo/